I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things

As people are wont to say, this is not like coal mining or anything, but why do people qualify what they find difficult in terms of extremes? Why is it so uncomfortable just owning that sometimes, life is difficult, and books are difficult and exposing yourself is difficult even if it is something you have chosen to do, with sound mind and body.

Roxane Gay

Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child’s blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality….I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.

Anaïs Nin

‘If you’re teasing me, Westley, I’m just going to kill you.’
‘How can you even dream I might be teasing?’
‘Well, you haven’t once said you loved me.’
‘That’s all you need? Easy. I love you. Okay? Want it louder? I love you. Spell it out, should I? I ell-oh-vee-ee why-oh-you. Want it backward? You love I.’
‘You are teasing now; aren’t you?’
‘A little maybe; I’ve been saying it so long to you, you just wouldn’t listen.“

William Goldman, The Princess Bride

Time is a great deadener; people forget, get bored, grow old, go away. She said that not much had happened between us anyway, historically speaking. But history is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing. A cat’s cradle. She said those sorts of feelings were dead, the feelings she once had for me. There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recoiler what’s dead. It won’t complain.

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges are not the only Fruit

This isn’t the part of the story when the woman overcomes her challenges and is rewarded with new love. It’s not the part when the rain washes away her fear or rinses off her grief.

This is the part when the clouds part so briefly she might have imagined it, when the promise of light is made and then brutally withheld, when restoration begins to seem possible but is not yet realized.

This isn’t the happy part of the story, but that’s O.K. This story isn’t finished.

No subsequent love of mine has ever felt as innocently sure and safe as the one I left behind that summer, and some part of me still mourns that loss. But each new love has expanded my sense of what I might encounter, what I might claim. It seems to me that freedom is both its own lesson and reward, and I have come to accept and even to welcome the rawness that change brings, the sting of new skin meeting the world.

Maybe because we live in an age of so many choices, most of them meaningless, we romanticize the notion that falling in love isn’t a choice but something that happens to us. That love tells us what to do, not the other way around. Love is the authority figure, and if love tells us wrongly, then we can’t be held fully responsible.

The thing is, you don’t really have to believe what you write in a blog for more than the moment when you’re writing it. You don’t bring the same solemnity that you would bring to an actual essay. You don’t think, is this what I really want to say? You think, This is what I feel like saying at this moment.

Nora Ephron, The Last Interview and Other Conversations

If I’d stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die-hard and the bright belief that there will be another marvelous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.

J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country

Nostalgia is so certain: the sense of familiarity it instills makes us feel like we know ourselves, like we’ve lived. To get a sense that we have already journeyed through something–survived it, experienced it–is often so much easier and less messy than the task of currently living through something. Though hard to grasp, nostalgia is elating to bask in–temporarily restoring color to the past. It creates a sense memory that momentarily stimulates context. Nostalgia is recall without the criticism of the present day, all the good parts, memory without the pain. Finally, nostalgia asks so little of us, just to be noticed and revisited; it doesn’t require the difficult task of negotiation, the heartache and uncertainty that the present does.

Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

I mean “God” as shorthand for the Good, for the animating energy of love; for Life, for the light that radiates from within people and from above; in the energies of nature, even in our rough, messy selves.

Anne Lamott

Maturity is the ability to live with unsolved problems.

Anne Lamott

Remembering birthdays doesn’t photograph. Being the first up to make a brew and wrestle the papers from the letterbox doesn’t have a checkbox on the dating site. There’s no app for “partners who just want to tell you that you’re enough.” I marvel at the marriages of my friends and their parents, too, how accepting they are, how full of compromise and trying, and I think, I don’t know if I can do that. But the point is, surely, that with the gentle ones, the ones who will chat to your mum on the phone when she calls and buy the book you commented on at the weekend as a surprise and save the ripest avocado for you, tomorrow, because you like avocado for breakfast, it doesn’t much seem like compromise at all.

Laura Jane Williams

Travel by foot. There is so much you can’t identify at top speed.

Cheryl Strayed

We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.
T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

No one got the instructions. That is the secret to life. Everyone is flailing around, winging it most of the time, trying to find the way back out, or through, or up, without a map. This lack of instruction manual is how most people develop compassion, and got they figure out how to show up, care, help and serve, as the only way of filling up and being free. Otherwise, you grow up to be someone who needs to dominate and shame others, so no one will know that you weren’t there the day the instructions were passed out.

Anne Lamott

“Don’t you think saying goodbye to your child will make death more painful?”

“Wouldn’t it be great if it did?”

Paul Kalinthi, When Breath Becomes Air

Grace means you’re in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own.

Anne Lamott

Unbearable suffering awaits us all. A brief glimpse through history can confirm: none of us are guaranteed a happy life. If we want meaning we have to create it. If we want to find peace, we need to know there’s a purpose for suffering.

We all have to start somewhere if us want to do better, and our own self is what us have to hand.

Alice Walker, The Color Purple

I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost… I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in the same place.
But, it isn’t my fault.
It still takes me a long time to get out.

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in. It’s a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault. I get out immediately.

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

I walk down another street.

Portia Nelson

We’re not born with unlimited choices. We can’t be anything we want to be. We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we’re stuck with it. Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.

Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. The artist must be like the Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell.

Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

You can do it

Do you understand how amazing it is to hear that from an adult? Do you know how amazing it is to hear that from anybody? It’s one of the simplest sentences in thew world, just four words, but they’re the four hugest words in the world when they’re put together.

You can do it.

I can do it.

Let’s do it.

Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Is fake love better than real love? Real love is responsibility, compromise, selflessness, being present and all that shit. Fake love is magic, excitement, false hope, infatuation, and getting high off the potential that another person is going to save you from yourself.

Melissa Broder, So Sad Today

We frequently long for things not because they are actually missing, but because the state of longing gives us the illusion of movement — something always out of reach to strive for. This can be a romantic experience, poignant or full of feelings, which places us in the center of what we think it means to “really feel alive.” If, however, the feelings should become too much, remember that there is also a romance in learning to want what we have.

October horoscope–Melissa Broder for Lenny Letter

There are a few people out there with whom you fit just so, and, amazingly, you keep fitting just so even after you have growth spurts or lose weight or stop wearing heels. You keep fitting after you have children or change religions or stop dyeing your hair or quit your job at Goldman Sachs to take up farming. Somehow, God is gracious enough to give us a few of those people, people you can stretch into, people who don’t go away, and whom you wouldn’t want to go away even if they offered to.

Lauren Winner, Girl meets God

Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn’t even realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.

Ann Patchett, Truth and Beauty

It must be hard to be a mother. All those years of knowing everything about your daughter, of dressing her and bearing her and being intimately acquainted with her every need and want, and then one day you wake up and realize you don’t even know what kind of dress to buy her at Clery’s.

Jessie Ann Foley, The Carnival at Bray

You can never have too much sky. You can fall asleep and wake up drunk on sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad. Here there is too much sadness and not enough sky. Butterflies are too few and so are flowers and most things that are beautiful. Still, we take what we can get and make the best of it.

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street

In my expertise have, there’s no secret to accomplishing almost any goal worth having.

Lauren Graham, Talking as Fast as I Can

Life is never predictable. Life is never really manageable. If your mindset is always “i’m just surviving,” it seems to me that would wind up being your mindset for the rest if your life. You’d just get stuck in it.

Joanna Gaines, The Magnolia Story

You can love someone down to their core and they can love you right back just as hard, and if you traded diaries you’d learn things you never suspected. There’s a part of everyone deep down inside of them not meant for you.

Mindy McGinnis, The Female of the Species

Having to fight for the thing you want doesn’t mean you deserve it any less.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’ve never, ever seen a more accurate portrayal of what it’s like to be a teenage girl than Hailee Steinfeld in this movie. Ever, ever, ever.

She is self involved and full of self-pity. Everything is the biggest deal in the world. She is fairly awful and just trying to figure it out but how can she when everything is falling apart all the time? She is me as a teenager. She is me now, if I’m being honest.

I’ve claimed that I am forever 17, but I think the truth is that, yes, I am forever 17, but as I get older I get better at holding in some of the harsher edges of 17. My first instinct is still to respond like a brat, to pout and to eat a Slurpee on the side of the road, but now I maybe just eat the Slurpee and call my Erwin. Now I’m 17 with a little more perspective.

I wrote about this movie before and it’s stuck with me ever since I saw it. And not just for the costumes, which are truly my dream aesthetic. I don’t want to dress like Sally Field when I’m 70, I want to dress like her now!! I’m trying every day!!

The film has stuck with me, though, for its portrayal of female friendships and how incredibly life-changing and life-forming and life-affirming they are. My female friendships are the thing in my life I am most proud of and rely on the most. They are my perspective and my balance and my plates of stuffing after I’ve humiliated myself yet again.

Sally, also, was something to celebrate. A complicated (read: human) woman full of the depths only a 70-year-old can bring to the screen.

Everyone is into this one so I don’t know what I’m really adding to this conversation.

This film is all that I adore about going to the movies. A believable love story between two very believable people. Ryan Gosling. Dancing in the streets of LA, music, and a hint of magical realism because all movies are just a bit of magical realism in the end, aren’t they?

It also has depth and conversations to start. Questions about life and relationships and choices.

If you want to have these conversations please contact me because I have a lot more to give in these conversations conversationally.

Speaking of musicals! While not technically a musical, this is one of my favorite music movies in a very long time. I love, love music movies. Perhaps the official term would be Movies Heavily Featuring Music And People Falling In Love To Said Music.

They fall right behind Two People Talk For 90 Minutes And Nothing Really Happens But They Are Forever Changed movies.

But Sing Street!

Ireland. The 80s. Teenage misfits.

I particularly love when teenagers are in a band. It almost feels like only teenagers should be allowed to be in bands because at that point everything is so incredibly sincere and full of emotion. No one can be in a band like a teenager can be in a band. There are costumes and music videos and intensity and the beginning of young love and!

Ok listen I feel like I have to shout here. This show has like NO ratings. No one is watching this thing. People are already saying it’s going the way of Arrested Development or Freaks and Geeks. A weird little show doing weird little things to a weird little audience that will likely be cancelled way ahead of its time. DO NOT LET THIS HAPPEN. WATCH THIS. It’s on Netflix so you can start there, but then join me in giving your Friday nights to this important cause.

I’m following along with the rest of you and I’m liking it and that’s about all there is to say.

3. Fleabag

In the words of my brother, a devastating show. It is well paced and well acted and it is remarkably devastating. I’ve heard this year described as the year of the complicated female on TV and I say every year should be the year of the complicated female and wow-e-zow the ending and let’s just say female not complicated female.

For most of my life, I have thought the purpose of said life was to find joy. Life is about happiness, and seeking happiness and finding happiness and, in my case, hunting down happiness and wrangling it like the bear it is, trying to force march it back to camp with me.

Joy!!

Yoga has calmed this to some extent, teaching me how to breathe through pain, that whatever level I’m on is the level I’m on no judgment. Yoga isn’t about joy or happiness, yoga is about breathing through whatever comes, about accepting yourself and accepting the moment.

In 10 minutes of meditation my mind can escape me thousands of times. The task of recognizing it has lost its way, lassoing it and bringing it back to the present—that’s hard work.

It is hard work.

But what I’m realizing now, almost a year later, is that, once again, that was just the beginning approach. The better approach is leaving the lasso at home, leaving the extreme verbs and the aggression that I love so much, and gently bringing my focus back.

The better approach is seeing my thoughts go by and observing them without judgment. Pain isn’t bad. Joy isn’t good. I don’t need to go chasing after love or serenity, or jumping in front of hurt or sadness. I need observe them all, and when I get distracted by one, gently bring my mind back.

Even that is without judgment. I don’t beat myself up for getting distracted–I just come back.

I love the video above that so perfectly illustrates this.

My mind, for the majority of my life, has been me chasing after cars and trying to halt cars and generally standing in the middle of a huge car wreck traffic jam wondering why all my efforts aren’t working.

I FREAKING CHASED DOWN JOY LIKE AN OLYMPIC RUNNER, OK? WHY DON’T I HAVE IT?

I TRIED TO STOP THAT PAIN USING SHEER FORCE OF WILL, ALL RIGHT? WHY AM I STILL A MESS?

This is what I’ve realized now, or what I think today.

That’s the, excuse me, joy, of blogging, isn’t it? To find the words for a specific day in my life and then to look back and say, oh wait, those aren’t true for me anymore.

This is what’s true now.

What is true for me today is that I’m learning to let my thoughts go by without judgment. Joy isn’t the be-all-end-all. Pain isn’t the worst thing in the world. I don’t need to avoid or seek either with all my energies, because life will give me both. I need to sit back as they come to me and accept that they are coming.

The purpose of life, I think, is love. Not romantic love go chase it down in on the freeway of life, love, but simply loving what you have. Loving through joy or pain or serenity. Loving yourself when you forget and jump into traffic yet again. Gently loving yourself back.

I’ve never understood it, really, and I guess I don’t fully now, but this is what I do know.

Grace is that moment when all is dark and you go outside for a walk.

Grace is allowing yourself to be imperfect, loving yourself anyway. Writing even though you know it will be terrible. Forgiving yourself for that. Forgiving over and over–even, and especially when you don’t deserve it.

As Anne Lamott says, grace bats last.

It’s a big word, a complicated word, a word I’m still unpacking.

But the other day, while I was talking to someone and getting angry that they weren’t responding how I wanted I had the thought, “Give them grace.”

The other night a friend and I were texting long after we both should have been asleep. This is not a sign of good things. This is a sign of unhappiness, shared unhappiness even if the unhappiness has nothing to do with the other person.

As we ended our conversation and she said she should get some sleep, I wanted to sign off with something supportive. Something profound. An “I love you, you’re doing great,” but better, you know?

I realized I wanted to sign off like Lin-Manuel.

Lin-Manuel Miranda sends out morning and evening validations on his Twitter. If he weren’t who he was, our Shakespeare, a man who reads a sonnet at the Tonys, then we would roll our eyes. But he is who he is. He is powerful with his words and his words have power.

Today I’d like to share some of that power with you.

I’d also like to pass on the little I know, which goes something like this: More grace, for yourself and for others. Less Twitter. If things are falling apart after midnight, go to bed.

And now for Lin-Manuel.

For the morning:

Good morning. Your body sets your internal temperature. See if you can set your internal temperment, even if it’s cold out.

Good morning, you magnificent thing, you. Give Monday a good kick in the pants.

Good morning! Recess today. Chase your happy.

Good morning. I’m tired. You tired? At your own pace, vamos.

Good morning. Take a breath. Then another. Repeat. Move at your pace. You got this.

Good morning. Yes, this blanket is warm and this bed is comfy. It’ll be waiting for you. Let’s go!

For the evening:

Good night. One step at a time. Your pace. Your unforgettable stride.

Good night, you. Make new mistakes. Dream new things, repeat!

Good evening. Your body sets your internal temperature. Now check the thermostat on your internal temperature. Have a great night.

Good night. There’s your blanket fort, waiting as ever. Sweet dreams!

Good night, stunner. You’re just getting started. Your age doesn’t matter. The stars are out, the night warm, You’re just getting started.

Good night. Take a breath. Then another. Repeat. Shake off the day. Sweet dreams.

Good night, you magnificent thing, you. Monday is thoroughly impressed with you: ya came out swinging. Rest up for Tuesday.